[Sara's blog] What’s in a Name?

The scene: July 9, 2005, nearly midnight. A large conference room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center full of assorted scientists, engineers, and support staff. This was the launch party for Astro-E2, a joint Japanese-American satellite mission strapped to a rocket thousands of miles away from Goddard at Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan. The lucky few were at the launch site, and the rest of us showed up at work on a Saturday night to celebrate.

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[podcast] The C.O.L.B.E.R.T. Episode

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Transcript (Text, PDF)

NASA is famous for its acronyms and technical jargon. If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch or a spacewalk, you’ve heard some of them. Blueshift is produced by the ASD EPO team at NASA GSFC – that is, the Astrophysics Science Division Education and Public Outreach team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Do we need to spell out NASA, too?

In this episode, we explore NASA mission names and where they come from. And we make a very special dedication – this one’s for you, Stephen Colbert!

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